Myth, and Mainstreaming the Discourse on Climate Change: A Case of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh, in his seminal works, The Hungry Tide (2004), The Great Derangement (2015) and Gun Island (2019), addresses the urgency of climate change and sustainability both creatively and critically. His essay “Wild Fiction” notes the value of stories that “animate the struggle over “Nature” (amitavghosh.com) and explore “fragility of nature” in the “age of machines”. In The Great Derangement he questions the aesthetics of realist fiction for propagating a human centric style to fiction writing at the cost of traditional literary ethos and aesthetics, thus, distancing narrative from natural environment.  Ghosh’s own writing shows a consistent attempt to forward the concerns of climate change by minimizing the disintegration between nature and fiction writing. For the purpose, the author has evolves a narrative style for “re-imaginings of Nature” through a personalized assortment of  narrative techniques such as myth, history, travelling, translation and etymology.  Ghosh does not couch his stories in the lap of nature superficially, rather entrenches concerns, and impact of climate crisis in the plot and characters of his novels deeply. In Gun Island, Ghosh facilitates  discourse on climate crisis by using the story of Manasa Devi, the local snake goddess of Bengal, and the legend of Bonduki Sadagar as whole-souled foundation and pillar of  discourse on climate crisis in the novel. The paper argues, and attempts to examine and illustrate, that the myth is crucial in mainstreaming the discourse on climate crisis in Gun Island to “reinforce, enliven and direct environmental concern…” (Buell).